13 Saturday Dec 2025
Posted in Scholarly works
Sadly Google are junking the trusty old Google Books interface, and your “bookshelves” lists with it…
They haven’t junked it yet, thankfully. So one can switch back for now. But be warned.
10 Wednesday Dec 2025
Posted in HPLinks, Lovecraftian arts, New books
HPLinks #66.
* Due this month, the new book Twenty-five Years of Hippocampus Press: 2000-2025 (2025)…
This volume chronicles in meticulous detail all the publications of Hippocampus Press since its founding in 2000. Complete tables of contents are provided, and notes on the compilation of the books are provided by the publisher and in-house editor. All in all, this compilation is a complete guide to a pioneering small press in the weird fiction field.
* The forthcoming book A Sense of Proportion: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long is holding its release date in December 2025, according to the current Hippocampus Press website. This date is for the Limited Edition Hardcover, an edition of 500, which appears to still be available for pre-order. It’s not yet known if the Brown University repository will release the scans of the letters simultaneously, or perhaps they may wait until the paperback appears.
* The Italian journal La Civilta Cattolica reviews the long letter Lovecraft wrote to Woodburn Harris, which is now translated into Italian and published as Potrebbe Anche non Esserci piu un Mondo…
the author is unparalleled in the century […] Lovecraft is a merciless pedagogue and an impassioned ideologue, intent on demolishing the three great illusions with which man tries to mitigate his dismay: romantic love, religion, and democracy. He is a racist, a nativist, a champion of the “humanistic man,” an extreme individualist.
* In Leicester University’s undergraduate Journal of Physics Special Topics, the short science paper “The Lack of Colour from Outer Space”…
We find that for photographs taken with a 1930s-style camera, the Outer Ones [in Lovecraft’s “Whisperer in Darkness”] must have a refractive index that increases with wavelength, controlled by a dispersion coefficient of B = −0.59 µm2.
* A paywalled chapter in a new £90 academic Gothic Studies book, “Fluid Memories of Horror: The presence of water in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and Alan Parker’s Angel Heart”.
* Now freely available in open-access, the academic book chapter “Domestic Jungles and Murderous Megaflora: Plants in Italian Science Fiction”.
* In Danish, Hvad Maanen Bringer (2025), being a thick book of one-man comics which adapt Lovecraft’s Dreamlands tales.
* Nick O’Gorman adapts H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Temple” as a 40-page comic-book. The Kickstarter has raised the funds, and is still live.
* John Coulthart this week revisits his artwork “H.P.L.”.
* Grognardia’s blog this week considers Lovecraft’s “The Other Gods”.
* This week SpraguedeCampFan has a long article on “Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith”.
* Leading Italian Tolkien scholar Paolo Nardi has a new YouTube video talk on “Ungoliant and Cosmic Horror”. Ungoliant being Tolkien’s giant primordial light-eating ur-spider. YouTube can now auto-dub to English.
* New on YouTube, a tribute to Glenn Lord: Robert E. Howard’s Greatest Champion.
* New on CivitAI, a Heavy Metal Magazine Cover LoRA for use with the new Z-Image Turbo. Z-Image has excellent text rendering capabilities. Also of note, a 70’s Painted Art LoRA for Z-Image, which means fantasy and sci-fi paintings rather than David Hockney et al.
* The Internet Archive is running its annual contest for creative short films that use public domain material, especially the 1930 releases due on 1st January 2026. Make a 2-3 minute short film with an equally open soundtrack. The 1930 date suggests obvious linkages with Lovecraft. They offer no rules on AI makeovers of visual materials, but I expect they’ll want to easily discern your use of original footage and images. The deadline is 7th January 2026. To help entrants, here’s my quick survey of what’s (perhaps) entering the public domain in 2026, with a focus on fantasy, science-fiction and horror.
* At the DAZ Store, AB’s Master of Horror is a character pack for use with DAZ’s base Genesis 9 3D figure, which ships with the free DAZ Studio software. The character is not quite Lovecraft, but pretty close. And you could get closer since the latest advanced G9 series of base figures are intended for adaptation, having many sliders for easily tweaking facial features and other anatomy. He would however need suitable HPL-style hair and a 1920 style suit. For which you would have to look to the G8 content, since there’s nothing like that for G9 (I looked). All of which would make the purchase quite expensive — although in such cases the long-time DAZ users know that the trick is to wishlist expensive items and then pick them off during the frequent deep sales.
* And finally, there was once another Lovecraft at Coney Island. New on Archive.org is the Victoria Daily Times (British Columbia, 26th October 1893). The front page for that day relayed an agency report from Coney Island, New York City…
— End-quotes —
“So aviation ain’t come down in price even yet! Why the Pete do they wanna advertise it so much if they’s gonna keep it out of the poor woikingman’s reach! I’ll have to hook a ride on one of these transatlantick planes. If it doesn’t get across, I’ll have just as good a time exploring Atlantis’s weedy pinnacles & barnacled temples.” — Lovecraft to Morton, September 1928.
“… the rudimentary $3.50 taste [of aeroplane flight] I got at Onset in August [1929, Cape Cod] has given me quite a taste for super-nubian soaring; a taste which I ain’t yet had the opportunity to reindulge. I’d hate to see aeroplanes come into common commercial use, since they merely add to the goddarn useless speeding up of an already over-speeded life! But as devices for the amusement of a gentleman, they’re oke!” — Lovecraft to Morton, November 1929.
“I know this has been done to death ever since Arthur Gordon Pym, yet none the less I think I’ll take a whack at it some day. I can imagine an aeroplane party landing on a peak far inland, & finding some glacier-crevasse leading down, down, down to the roofs of a silent & cryptical city of stone whose dimensions are not quite right — or I can imagine a natural (or artificial) phenomenon causing a large-scale melting of the ice …. with revelations better hinted at than told!” — Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, November 1930.
“It is puerile & silly to fancy that a man living from childhood in an aeroplane age could possibly have even approximately the same basic notions of distance & national isolation as a man living from childhood in an age of horses & galleys, ox-teams & canoes, impassable mountain ranges & unplumbed black forests.” — Lovecraft to Belknap Long, February 1931.
“… there have been newspaper accounts of an incredible place in New Mexico — the Navajo country — called ‘The Desert of the Black Blood’. This is a ghoulish and desolate area of broken lava which is rifted by great chasms and which has probably never been penetrated beyond a few miles by any white man — or any living Indian for that matter. Aeroplanes, flying over it, have spied what look like ruins at its very heart; and local legends tell of an ancient and mysterious city whose crumbling walls now harbour carnivorous dragons.” — Lovecraft to Hoffmann Price, December 1936.
10 Wednesday Dec 2025
Posted in Historical context
A small update on my “Uncle Eddy” article in the Lovecraft Annual 2022…
Lovecraft visits the Eddys, January 1928…
As for my hibernation — I ain’t ben outa the shanty sence Jany. 2, on which date I was damn near knocked out by de cold after payin’ honest C. M. Eddy a call. I hadda come home in a cab, & couldn’t relish my vittles for a week afterward.” — Lovecraft to Morton, 28th February 1928
Thus my newly discovered April 1929 address for the Eddys, at 317 Plain Street in Lower South Providence, could well be the address visited by Lovecraft in January 1928.
317 Plain Street, still there.
06 Saturday Dec 2025
Posted in Unnamable
It’s that time of year again, in which a few past gems will soon slip into the public domain. Authors who died in 1955, books published in 1930, plus some music and song. Here are some items I dug up, which may perhaps interest Tentaclii readers. Possibly there may be some I’ve missed, and if so please comment.
Writers who died in 1955:
Mindret Loeb Lord, a lesser Weird Tales writer in the late 1930s and 40s.
Nat Schachner, early U.S. advocate for manned space travel and a founder of the American Interplanetary Society. Prolific SF story writer of the 1930s (for Astounding and others) and also published a smattering of pulp horror tales.
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, first a romance writer and then (as the Depression deepened) a suspense/mystery writer for the early pulp paperbacks. Apparently also published one children’s fantasy novel titled Miss Kelly.
Wallace Stevens, poet. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered him, but his poetry is said to be… “abstract, fantastical, speculative, artificial, strange”.
Thomas Mann, author of the classic Death in Venice and others.
Teilhard de Chardin, the speculative/mystical thinker.
Ortega y Gasset, the famous Spanish author.
False alarms:
SF author Bryan Berry (aka Rolf Garner) did not die in 1955, as was once claimed. Research now shows 1966.
Tod Browning’s Dracula movie is said by some to be 1930, but appears to have been released in 1931.
Some pages on Wikipedia have Jean Cocteau’s surrealist first film The Blood of a Poet as 1930, but the release was 1932.
In nations with copyright expiry as ‘life +50 years’:
James Blish, SF author.
Murray Leinster, SF author.
P.G. Wodehouse.
Fiction published in 1930:
H. Rider Haggard, his late book Belshazzar.
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, the groundbreaking classic of modern SF.
E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Skylark Three, featuring the first truly epic space-opera space battles.
Jack Williamson, The Cometeers, a space-faring SF novel.
Franz Kafka’s The Castle, in the first English translation.
Philip Wylie, Gladiator, a proto-superhero novel showing how a ‘real’ serum-induced superhero would struggle to live in 1920s America.
Hugh Lofting, The Twilight of Magic. By the Doctor Doolittle author, said to be a long fairy-tale novel for children. Update: U.S. copyright page says 1930, but apparently it did no appear in U.S. bookshops until 1931.
Andre Maurois, Patapoufs et Filifers. In English in 1941 as Fattypuffs and Thinifers. Short 92-page children’s comedy-fantasy of an underground world divided into the fat and the thin. Potential for a new translation/adaptation from the 1930 French original?
Movies of 1930:
Animal Crackers, the Marx Brothers movie.
The Climax, said to be about mental telepathy, from a notable play on the topic. Later filmed again.
Hell’s Angels, the big-budget Howard Hughes aviation movie.
Just Imagine, an early science-fiction musical movie with impressive Metropolis-style sets and props, but little else. Its spaceship was later re-used for the Flash Gordon series. The versions that survive are said to have terrible visual quality and there are many gaps.
In Germany… “released in 1930 with the title Die Zwolfte Stunde – Eine Nacht des Grauens [‘The Twelfth Hour – A Night of Horror’], an ‘artistic adaptation’ of Noseferatu made by a Dr. Waldemar Roger.” I just found the mention of it, and I’m not sure if it survives.
Also in Germany, Alraune, which sounds like a sort of updated Frankenstein?
Also: Robert Riskin died 1955, the screenwriter for the big-budget movie of Lost Horizon (1937).
Non-fiction from 1930:
[Wikipedia:] “Romanticism’s celebration of euphoria and sublimity has always been dogged by an equally intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime and shady atmosphere; with the options of ghosts and ghouls, the grotesque, and the irrational. The name “Dark Romanticism” was given to this form by the literary theorist Mario Praz in his lengthy study of the genre published in 1930, The Romantic Agony. … First English translation 1933″.
Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe. Popular science book by a leading British astrophysicist, possibly useful for understanding the state of knowledge of the cosmos in Lovecraft’s time. Appears to have been published in America in the same year. Also appears to have been read by Lovecraft.
Winthrop Packard, Wild Pastures. A “vivid and descriptive account of Packard’s experiences traveling through the vast and rugged terrain of the Western United States” as the culture of the Old West faded or changed.
The Mound Builders. A book-length reconstruction of the prehistoric American ‘mound builders’ culture, by an archeologist adhering to the knowledge of his time.
James Frazer, Myths of the Origin of Fire. Golden Bough author, possibly only a British publication?
Contemporary Illustrators of Children’s Books, a USA publication. Seemingly a survey rather than a directory?
Chemical Magic. USA, book on stage and trick-magic tricks done with chemicals and inks. Such a book would never be published today, but back then nearly every middle-class boy had a chemistry set at home.
Walter de la Mare, Desert Islands and Robinson Crusoe. USA book, with his essay on the topic followed by his very wide range of quotations on the theme as found in pre-1930 poetry and tales.
Magazines and illustrators:
Florence Susan Harrison, died 1955. Illustrated children’s books in a Pre-Raphaelite ‘knights and maidens’ style, adapted for story-book illustration.
01 Monday Dec 2025
HPLinks #65.
Slightly late this week, to take account of the fact that many Americans will have been away from their computers for Thanksgiving.
* Newly published, the academic Routledge book Graeco-Roman Horror and its Modern Reception: Unleashing Classical Dread (2025). The Introduction notes that Part II of the book…
… concludes with a case study of classical reception in the realm of H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and the Hermetic deity Yog-Sothoth, [examining] how the concept of [Greek lettering, word uncapturable by OCR] from the Hermetica and the later motif of the Veil of Isis, once associated with solace after death, are reinterpreted in subsequent traditions. According to these traditions, discovering the true nature of reality is a terrifying experience. [The chapter] argues that Lovecraft inherits this tradition but makes a more ambiguous change to Hermetism, providing positive connotations to the initiatory experience.” This chapter itself claims… “Lovecraft’s use of Hermetism lies at the core of some of his conceptualization of cosmic horror.
* New in French in the major new academic chapter book Theologica Galactica (2025), “Grands Anciens versus Grande Race. A la croisee des horizons teleologiques entre theologie et science-fiction dans l’univers d’H.P. Lovecraft” (‘At the crossroads of teleological horizons between theology and science fiction in the universe of H.P. Lovecraft’)…
… the exploration of the Lovecraftian cosmos offers a teleological literary experience: that of the negation of the values of humanism, values which fundamentally imbued Kant during his lifetime. We propose here a hermeneutic outline: for us it is a question of trying to understand in what way this conflicting dialogue symbolically plays on the one hand the collapse of all theology, through the representation of a systematics of the superhuman, and on the other hand the failure of the dreams of science fiction, this time through the staging of the impotence of the paragon of science and technology in the face of the announcement of an apocalyptic annihilation.
* The forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie (January 2026) will have the chapter “Children of the Mad Scientist: Lovecraft’s Dr. Munoz and Herbert West’s Zombies”.
* In Italian and newly on YouTube, Tolkien scholar Paolo Nardi discusses “The Cats of Ulthar” with Nicola Nannerini. Note that YouTube can now do AI auto-dubbing into English.
* The latest monthly round-up from the German Lovecraftians gives dates for their annual national meet-up, set for “10th to 12th April 2026”. They note that the online version of their Lovecrafter magazine is still looking for a new editor, as is the more Lovecraft-the-man focussed Lovecraft Lore newsletter.
* The German newsletter also notes that… “The Bietzen Theatre Company is bringing “The Shadow over Innsmouth” to the stage as a live radio play in Saarbrucken.” And there’s news that another German theatrical Lovecraft production is now a film, which appears to be set to premiere in early 2026…
On 6th February 2026, the film The Model, a one-man adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” will be shown at the Bottger bookstore in the city of Bonn. This adaptation, originally performed as a theatrical production, was conceived by the artist and writer Thomas Franke. Franke will be present at the screening and will discuss, among other things, the genesis of his work.
* In France, Spectacle Detective Lovecraft a Lyon, which offers details of a stage-play, set for a run in the city of Lyon throughout January 2026.
A black and white detective comedy that mixes suspense, absurd comedy and fantasy. A retro atmosphere inspired by American thrillers from the 40s. By the Cocotte Company [Cocotte Compagnie], and entirely staged in black and white.
The play appears to imagine that Lovecraft had lived, and that during wartime he turned his knowledge and loathing of New York City to profit. Thus in 1943 he works in the city as a private detective, able to be “hired by Veronica to find her husband… and the Necronomicon”. Sounds great. Booking now, and hopefully there will be a filmed version available in due course.
* New on Archive.org, good auction images of a movie-prop Necronomicon.
* The latest SFFAudio Podcast #867 pairs “The Thing On The Roof” by Robert E. Howard and “The Nameless City” by H.P. Lovecraft. Librivox readings, then a 50 minute discussion — which is also summarised in text at the link above.
* The Grognardia blog has an article that considers Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City”, as a lesser transitional tale but one that “anticipates several of Lovecraft’s major later works”.
* Adventures Fantastic blog has an article considering Poul Anderson and the Vagaries of Publishing, musing on how some fine writers are subject to an undeserved posthumous decline into obscurity.
* One way of keeping neglected authors alive is excellent audiobooks of their work. Such as those being made now by Gates of Imagination, which last week released a reading of Robert E. Howard’s “The Footfalls Within”, a Solomon Kane tale. Given the pace of AI, we’re soon going to be able to auto-produce good soundscapes and music to accompany such audiobooks, generated by having the AI auto-analyse the text. Which may further enhance the appeal of older works. Ideally the audiobooks would have a new ‘triple track’ file-format, rather than a hard mixdown, thus enabling the listener to easily ‘turn off’ the accompanying music or soundscape if not required.
* And finally, taking of AI… The excellent new free Z-Image Turbo, released only last week, already has the free DaNecro Necronomicon Sketch Style LoRA ‘plug-in’. This takes advantage of Z-Image’s precision text-rendering to help you generate images of ‘Necronomicon pages’. The CivitAI page omits the information (found in a comment) that the prompt triggers are old hand drawn book or written book.
Sadly CivitAI is not available in the UK except via a good VPN, due to what is effectively government censorship. I read today that Substack is about to go the same way.
— End-quotes —
“Possibly I shall emerge from obscurity some day as the only genuine light poet in amateurdom. Since other amateur bards seem to be unable to achieve success in this medium, I shall perhaps aim for distinction in a field so little occupied, & hitherto neglected by me save for occasional effusions.” — the young Lovecraft has some hopes for his ability with producing “light verse”, if only to glean some fame in the little ‘zines of amateurdom, 1917.
“Poverty and obscurity have their advantages — for they practically guarantee us dead-broke old nonentities against the tragic humiliations and ignominies to which our more materially fortunate contemporaries are constantly exposed.” — Lovecraft to Barlow, 1936.
“Time enough to know the great when our work speaks for itself and spontaneously attracts their notice …. and if it never does that, we are just as well off in our merciful obscurity.” — Lovecraft to Miss Bonner, May 1936.
“Were this prodigious prospect anywhere within the easie reach and knowledge of the town, ‘twou’d be flockt with and noisy revellers on every Sunday and bank-holiday; but obscurity hath effected that unsully’d preservation which design is impotent to achieve, this region being far south of any great road, and north of a district very flat and notable for its want of pleasing scenes. I doubt if ten men in Providence are sensible it is on the globe.” — Lovecraft on the view from just to the left of the farmhouse of Mr. Law, owner of the Dark Swamp. Encountered on Lovecraft’s cross-country quest to find the Dark Swamp.